[Lazarus] I have some custom components, can I convert Delphi -> Lazarus?

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Michael Schnell wrote:

> He also wants to use closed source 3rd party stuff and want to impose 
> copy protection to his projects. All that is rather queer with an open 
> source IDE.

Why? It's not as though he's trying to add non-open components to the 
published IDE and expecting other people to use them, and since there's 
no requirement to publish stuff you build using an "open" license (GPL 
etc.) I don't see that putting copy protection on it makes any 
difference at all.

The format of binary-distributed libraries etc. could prove to be more 
of a problem, and consulting Jonas et al. in the fpc-pascal mailing list 
might be necessary. However I would say that while I recognise that 
changing the protection "dongle" is obviously a non-starter, I'd be very 
suspicious of any protection scheme which relies on unpublished source 
code: such a thing would smack of "security by obscurity" which is 
universally considered to be a Bad Thing.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]